Unsurprisingly, foreign aid has once again become a political
football in this year's primary season. Today's GOP presidential
candidates regularly bash it, echoing "Mr. Republican" Robert Taft--who
dismissed overseas assistance more than six decades ago as "pouring
money down a rat hole."

But public opposition to providing foreign aid is one of the hoariest misconceptions in U.S. foreign policy.

In fact, U.S. citizens support foreign aid, particularly when it is
targeted to alleviating poverty and humanitarian suffering. This is
remarkable, given the magnitude by which Americans consistently
overestimate the percentage of the federal budget actually devoted to
foreign aid. These findings emerge from a newly updated digest of U.S. and international polling on global issues developed by CFR and the Program on International Policy Attitudes.
They suggest that bashing foreign aid--as most of the leading GOP
candidates for president have done--is a campaign strategy of dubious
value. It may provide red meat to the Republican base, but it ignores
the generous impulses of the American majority.

All of this brings to mind a famous lyric from the Broadway show, Porgy and Bess. To paraphrase Gershwin, things you're liable to read in the (GOP foreign policy) bible ain't necessarily so.

In the United States, there is actually a broad consensus that
developed countries have "a moral responsibility to work to reduce
hunger and severe poverty in poor countries"--81 percent of the U.S.
public holds this view (WPO, 2008). Americans also believe that it is in
rich countries' own interest to help poor countries develop, but that
wealthy nations are not doing enough to help poor nations.

U.S. public support for foreign aid has proven resilient despite the
global economic downturn and the struggles of many Americans to get by.
In a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs, 74 percent of
U.S. citizens polled favored providing "food and medical assistance" to
other countries, and 62 percent favored delivering "aid to help needy
countries to develop their economies." To be sure, the recession had
dragged down these numbers slightly from 2004 (when the equivalent
figures were 82 percent and 74 percent), but both propositions retained
clear majority support.

As in years past, when asked, Americans initially tend to say that
their government should reduce economic assistance to other nations
(CCGA, 2010). But this attitude rests on persistent misperceptions of
the share of the U.S. federal budget devoted to aid. For decades now,
U.S. citizens have overestimated U.S. foreign aid spending by several
orders of magnitude. When WorldPublicOpinion.org asked the public in
2010 to estimate the percentage of the federal budget going to foreign
aid, respondents on average reckoned 27 percent--and suggested that a
more appropriate percentage might be 13 percent. The actual figure is
less than one percent. (When informed of the actual figure, Americans
tend to be initially incredulous). When given accurate information, a
clear majority of Americans favors either increasing current aid levels
or keeping levels constant. In addition, a large majority of Americans
say they would be willing to increase spending on foreign aid to meet anti-poverty targets, provided other nations agree to do the same.

During recessions, legislators are quick to target overseas
assistance for the scalpel. Unlike military spending, after all, there
is no powerful domestic constituency that will be alienated by draconian
cuts.

But here the public parts company with politicians.

When asked by pollsters to engage in an (imaginary) budget-cutting
exercise of their own, Americans did not single out foreign aid,
especially its more altruistic forms, for disproportionate cuts. In
2011, for example, the Program for Public Consultation provided a
representative sample of Americans with an online exercise, allowing
them to manipulate the U.S. federal budget, broken down into 31
categories. Participants actually increased funding for humanitarian aid
by 18 percent and nicked global health by just 2 percent, while cutting
development assistance by a more significant 14 percent. On average,
respondents cut these three aid programs by 3 percent--significantly less
than the average of 11 percent they advocated across the 31 programs.
By contrast, respondents placed heavier cuts on U.S. aid programs with
less altruistic motives, recommending a 15 percent decline in military
assistance and a 23 percent reduction in Economic Support Funds
(essentially political support for U.S. allies).

However, the Republican presidential candidates have read the field
differently. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have both endorsed Texas
Governor Rick Perry's idea of "zeroing out" the U.S. foreign aid budget,
and eliminating all assistance "to countries that don't support the
United States of America." Gingrich has stated, "I think it's a pretty
good idea to start at zero and sometimes stay there." Romney has agreed
that the United States should "start everything off at zero."
Unsurprisingly, the libertarian Ron Paul has been most scathing, calling
foreign aid to Africa "worthless." As he said at Tuesday's presidential
debate, "I think the aid is all worthless. It doesn't do any good for
most of the people. You take money from poor people in this country and
you end up giving it to rich people in poorer countries."

Indeed, among the remaining GOP candidates, only former Senator Rick
Santorum has rejected "zeroing out" foreign aid, describing it as a form
of "pandering." Of aid to Africa, Santorum argues, "it's absolutely
essential." His rationale is partly strategic, noting that the continent
has in the past been "on the brink of complete meltdown and chaos,
which would have been fertile ground for the radical Islamists to be
able to get a foothold." But he's also been among the most ardent GOP
champions of HIV-AIDS assistance in Africa.

Such positions suggest that Santorum, alone among the GOP hopefuls,
would help preserve George W. Bush's greatest presidential legacy: his
enormous expansion of foreign aid, notably his President's Emergency
Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved hundreds of thousands, if
not millions, of lives worldwide. Bush also launched the Millennium
Challenge Account, to channel more aid to countries that rule justly,
promote economic growth, and invest in their people. These investments
testified to the generosity of the United States and to the president's
conviction that well-targeted aid could advance human dignity worldwide.

This article originally appeared at CFR.org, an Atlantic partner site.

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On August 21, the “moon” will pass between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light of the latter. The government agency NASA says this will result in “one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights.” The astronomers there claim to have calculated down to the minute exactly when and where this will happen, and for how long. They have reportedly known about this eclipse for years, just by virtue of some sort of complex math.

This seems extremely unlikely. I can’t even find these eclipse calculations on their website to check them for myself.

Meanwhile the scientists tell us we can’t look at it without special glasses because “looking directly at the sun is unsafe.”

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

Just seven months into his presidency, Trump appears to have achieved a status usually reserved for the final months of a term.

In many ways, the Trump presidency never got off the ground: The president’s legislative agenda is going nowhere, his relations with foreign leaders are frayed, and his approval rating with the American people never enjoyed the honeymoon period most newly elected presidents do. Pundits who are sympathetic toward, or even neutral on, the president keep hoping that the next personnel move—the appointment of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, say, or the long-rumored-but-never-delivered departure of Steve Bannon—will finally get the White House in gear.

But what if they, and many other people, are thinking about it wrong? Maybe the reality is not that the Trump presidency has never gotten started. It’s that he’s already reached his lame-duck period. For most presidents, that comes in the last few months of a term. For Trump, it appears to have arrived early, just a few months into his term. The president did always brag that he was a fast learner.

An analysis of Stormfront forums shows a sometimes sophisticated understanding of the limits of ancestry tests.

The white-nationalist forum Stormfront hosts discussions on a wide range of topics, from politics to guns to The Lord of the Rings. And of particular and enduring interest: genetic ancestry tests. For white nationalists, DNA tests are a way to prove their racial purity. Of course, their results don’t always come back that way. And how white nationalists try to explain away non-European ancestry is rather illuminating of their beliefs.

Two years ago—before Donald Trump was elected president, before white nationalism had become central to the political conversation—Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists then at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to study Stormfront forum posts about genetic ancestry tests. They presented their study at the American Sociological Association meeting this Monday. (A preprint of the paper is now online.) After the events in Charlottesville this week, their research struck a particular chord with the audience.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

Since 1907, Portland, Oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Anti-Semitic logic fueled the violence over the weekend, no matter what the president says.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was ostensibly about protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee. It was about asserting the legitimacy of “white culture” and white supremacy, and defending the legacy of the Confederacy.

So why did the demonstrators chant anti-Semitic lines like “Jews will not replace us”?

The demonstration was suffused with anti-black racism, but also with anti-Semitism. Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. “This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure, congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of the building when they were done praying.

If the president is concerned about violence on the left, he can start by fighting the white supremacist movements whose growth has fueled its rise.

In his Tuesday press conference, Donald Trump talked at length about what he called “the alt left.” White supremacists, he claimed, weren’t the only people in Charlottesville last weekend that deserved condemnation. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he declared. “Nobody wants to say that.”

I can say with great confidence that Trump’s final sentence is untrue. I can do so because the September issue of TheAtlantic contains an essay of mine entitled “The Rise of the Violent Left,” which discusses the very phenomenon that Trump claims “nobody wants” to discuss. Trump is right that, in Charlottesville and beyond, the violence of some leftist activists constitutes a real problem. Where he’s wrong is in suggesting that it’s a problem in any way comparable to white supremacism.

The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.

When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books.